Violence, Protection, and the Political Economy of Security Provision in Ongoing Conflicts

This dissertation is a collection of three manuscripts that sequentially unpack the complicated, often contradictory relationship between local political order and security in ongoing conflicts. I unpack these relationships in papers that explain the perspective of armed groups, civilians, and international interveners, respectively. In the first paper, I examine the consequences of variation in armed group relations for spatial patterns in violence by re-examining the relationship between mines and violence. A large body of research shows that natural resources increase the likelihood of violent competition in resource-rich regions, but at the local level, mines and violence are not correlated. I explain this puzzle by providing a theory of spatial discontinuities in revenue generation in resource-rich conflict zones. Protection rackets and incentives for cooperation limit violence at points of extraction but access to informal taxation opportunities on the transportation network incentivize conflict. Only price shocks upend the armed groups' incentives to cooperate at the mines. My findings explain why natural resources incentivize cooperation locally while still destabilizing the region. In the second paper, I ask whether protection rackets improve civilian perceptions of their security? I argue that informal, exploitative security arrangements improve civilian perceptions of their security when the community in which they live have recent experience with banditry, which increases local demand for protection, and when the armed actors institute routinized tribute schemes, which while extortive and costly to civilians, provides highly valuable predictability to both the armed actors and civilians in contrast to roving banditry. I empirically evaluate my theory using responses to an original survey in eastern DRCongo, where state absence created privatized local protection rackets, which I pair with fine-grained data on violence and the location and operators of roadblocks. These results demonstrate how local security vacuums can produce exploitative informal institutions that undermine macro state-building projects while paradoxically providing crucial protection to vulnerable civilians. In the third paper, co-authors and I present and empirically evaluate a theory of civilian perceptions of international peacekeeping missions. We argue that civilians exposed to the mission are more likely to perceive the mission as successful. We find support for our theory leveraging over 16,000 responses to surveys across two waves and two sampling strategies in three provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where one of the world's largest and longest standing peacekeeping missions, MONUSCO, operates. We show that exposure to MONUSCO is associated with improved perceptions of the mission, and that this relationship is not driven by selection effects. We additionally show that base closures, which abruptly decreased civilian exposure to Blue Helmets locally, are associated with decreased perceptions of the mission. Our findings suggest that missions can improve their relationships by increasing their visibility among host communities. Combined, the articles in this dissertation represent a research agenda focused on understanding how security provision is provided and manipulated at the local level. It does so by analyzing dynamics from the bottom up and discusses the implications for human security, patterns of violence, and international policy.PhDPolitical ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/172602/1/tomealia_1.pd